Benjamin Disraeli: Never man devised more pernicious nonsense than in trade treaties. AN attack without precedent the inhabitants of the Guajira Peninsula have been traders for centuries and have done so without anyone to teach them: is the natural thing for those who are facing the immense ocean, a friend that serves to keep in touch with the world and next to the border, which pass through freely on one and another sense as one of the scenarios of everyday life. The guajiro have been enshrined since even before traders in that scene appear the Spanish conquerors. For decades Maicao was the epicenter of the commercial activity of La Guajira. Attracted by its geographical location came to this town people coming from different parts of the world who managed to turn the small town into a city prosperous, promising and vigorous, point of arrival and departure of goods from the most important ports of the Caribbean to several cities in Colombia and Venezuela and Colombia.

The organized employers in the country always trade in La Guajira they saw with distrust and pressed the national Government so that it imposed measures of control and so happened particularly in the 1980s when the country embarked on the so-called economic openness. It was in that same decade when local leaders, after intense negotiations with the central Government managed the creation of the area of Uribia and Manaure Maicao special customs regime and, later, the creation of the Development Fund of La Guajira. With the issued rules regulated commercial activity and ended (or that wanted to become) the stigma of considering the guajiro as smugglers and serious harm to the national economy. Various situations made trade from Maicao to lose its attractiveness and hundreds of merchants migrated to other regions and countries in search of better conditions for their businesses. Trade in Maicao became a very poor reflection of what was in the decades of the seventies and eighties and himself, practically to survive. But the survival not It was easy: should withstand new adversity as the removal of the banking entities and new restrictions from the authorities. However, the most absurd, harmful and discriminatory still to come and it came wrapped in the condemnable Decree 3038 figure, a measure made with carving just of the condemned to death, with the precise specifications to affect a victim in particular and delete it from the stage of open competition, equality of conditions and legal stability which are based on healthy economies and democracies of the free peoples. Decree, conceived so tricky and malicious, suspicious aims of eliminating trade in liquors from Maicao to favour interests other than in the Department of La Guajira.

Fortunately worktable created after the discussion promoted in good time by the representative Wilmer Gonzalez, has managed to slow the effects of the rule though, on that same stage of consultation, has been able to palpate the intransigence of those who represent the Government. Trade in Maicao and the of the Guajira have because fight against everything. Even against the incomprehension of some of their Colombian brothers who have not understood yet that trade in the peninsula is not a matter of buy and sell only but it is almost the only option of generating resources for the support of thousands of families. Alejandro Rutto Martinez is a prestigious Colombian academic dedicated to teaching, journalism and the world of conferences and seminars.